Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Netflix
Disbarred South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh is in a world of trouble, and Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal—a three-part Netflix docuseries (Feb. 22) about his numerous alleged crimes—won’t help his cause.
A detailed non-fiction investigation into the scandals that preceded, and culminated with, the June 2021, slaying of his wife Maggie and younger son Paul, it’s a damning exposé told in large part by those who were closest to Mallory Beach, the 19-year-old who died in a boating accident caused by Paul. Its only failing is that, with Murdaugh currently on trial for the murders of his son and spouse, it’s a fundamentally incomplete portrait—thereby suggesting that additional chapters covering ongoing events may be on the way.
Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal is thus almost too timely, jumping the gun a bit by arriving before its story has reached a conclusion. While it’s perhaps difficult to imagine Alex being exonerated for the double homicide of which he’s accused, stranger things have happened when it comes to his clan, as demonstrated by directors Julia Willoughby Nason and Jenner Furst’s series. The doc initially focuses on Feb. 23, 2019, when Paul took a boat ride out to an oyster roast with his girlfriend Morgan Doughty, their friends Miley Altman and Connor Cook, and Connor’s cousin Anthony Cook and his girlfriend Mallory. As was his tendency, Paul quickly got hammered and then refused to let anyone else drive his boat home. After a scuffle in which Paul slapped Morgan—not the first time such abuse had taken place, according to Morgan—the boat crashed into a piling under a bridge on Archers Creek.